Rainbow Tears and Pink Cloud Dresses
by Mark of the Asphodel
Summary: The terms "forever" and "always" fall into the gulf between humans and the dragonkin. The inevitable resolution to the tale of a little girl who is not what she seems and the brother who is not what he promises. Post-FE3.


**Rainbow Tears and Pink-Cloud Dresses**

**Disclaimer: I do not own **_**Fire Emblem**_** or any of its characters.**

**Warning: It's the resolution to a tale of a little girl who is not quite a girl and the brother who isn't her brother. If you can't stand a dragon-induced meditation on human frailty, what are you doing playing or reading **_**Fire Emblem**_**?**

_***_

_Millennium Court. Pales, Archanea. Sometime in the seventh century._

"Locked herself in her room?"

"What a selfish little beast, to inconvenience everyone at a time like this."

"Won't even come down for meals, poor thing."

"Bring her out of there. Immediately."

The last sentence was a command, albeit a nervous high-strung command from someone not yet comfortable with their own authority. But royal orders were royal orders, and so a parade of hapless servants was dispatched to the second floor to bring "milady Princess" from her bedchamber.

Had any of these servants succeeding in making it past the stout oaken door, which proved both physically locked and magically warded, they would have seen a room appropriate to a young lady of high station. The chamber was filled with dolls and toys, picture-books and other pretty things beloved of small girls. It all spoke of a child who was cherished and perhaps overindulged-- and ill-mannered, apparently, given the disorder and mess of the room. The floor was strewn with cast-off shoes and thrown-down toys: a stuffed pegasus, a sketchbook, a hair ornament. Meanwhile, milady Princess lay face down on her unmade bed, her shoulders heaving with violent sobs that penetrated that stout door and were heard in the hallway beyond.

Had any servant managed to breach the door and see the princess, they would have beheld a child who, in her current state of upset, did appear a frightful little beast. Her dark-green hair spilled around her in disheveled waves, like strands of water-weed. When she lifted her head from the pillows to glare at the door, she raised a blotched face streaked with strangely iridescent tears. The princess looked to be about ten years old, and the hapless servants spoke to her through the door as though she were a child of ten.

She was not ten years old. That was part of the problem.

*

"Princess."

The voice, muffled by the door, was more plaintive than the three or four voices that preceded it. It wanted the same thing as the rest, though, and so its pleas were ignored.

"Please, Princess Tiki. Open the door. The queen is askin' for you."

"Go away."

"But princess...."

"Go away," was all she would say, as the tears leaked from her eyes to stain her pillow.

In the years she studied with Lord Gotoh, he tried to warn her. Love humans, but from a distance, the ancient sage said. Do not try to walk among them, and never give over your heart to them. They will always cause your heart to shatter. But Tiki disobeyed him, disobeyed the awful old dragon who locked her up in an icy temple where she only slept and had nightmares, and she gave all of her heart to the brother who lifted her out of the cold and the darkness and the never-ending _loneliness_ and carried her away. And because Gotoh allowed this human prince to take Tiki and call her "sister" and give her a place in his world, Tiki developed the illusion that her brother was somehow _different_ from other humans. Maybe nobody else was different, not even their oldest sister, but her brother would never break Tiki's heart. He led Tiki from the land of nightmares into a beautiful dream, a dream not just of warmth and light and love, but of exhilaration and heart-pounding terror and every other feeling that let Tiki know that she wasn't sleeping anymore, but was truly alive. Even the terror made her feel good in the end, because her brother was always there beside her, telling her it was going to be all right-- and it always was. And Tiki found herself so happy that at times she couldn't believe it, and she would then catch herself and turn to her brother and ask him yet again.

"Will I really be able to live with you always?"

"Really and truly," he promised her, and tapped her on the nose in a way that made her laugh. "You won't ever be alone again."

Really. Truly. Always. Forever.

And so the old palace named Millennium Court became Tiki's home where she lived with her brother and his wife and their children, while down the street at the great Academy of Magic lived big sister Elice and her husband and _their_ children. The entire Holy City of Pales became Tiki's playground, and it seemed that everyone she met was family or friends. And Tiki forgot, if she ever had really understood, that for humans, "always" and "forever" didn't really _mean_ anything, that forty years was "forever" to a human. Tiki forgot, until the day when her brother was quite simply no longer there, and wouldn't be. Forever.

The people at the door wouldn't leave her alone. Tiki stayed where she was, her face pressed into her soaked pillow. At times, her tears seemed to run dry, and she would roll onto her back and lay awhile, staring at ceiling with its pattern of dragons and pegasus riders flying happily together. The ceiling normally made her smile, but now she didn't feel capable of smiling. It was like the time she'd been hypnotized by that evil sorcerer-- her body felt like it wasn't hers anymore, and her insides were racked by emotions she didn't even have a _name_ for.

She thought of Lord Gotoh, and of how hard he tried to warn her. Gotoh used a hundred comparisons to show her. He spoke of the lilies that bloomed for a single day in the palace gardens, of the mayflies that burst from the water at dawn and fell lifeless to the ground at dusk, of fragile snowflakes that even a human's breath could melt. He said that Tiki could cherish the flowers, could smile at the mayfly when it landed on her finger, could _study_ the patterns of the snowflakes in the instant they existed before they turned to shining drops of water. But to love these things, to want them to be any more than they were-- that was folly. And such folly belonged to humans, not to the dragonkin.

Each time her lessons with Gotoh ended, Tiki gladly left the sage to his cold temple filled with old tomes and older fears, and returned to the brother who lifted her up to the sun with his strong arms and carried her home.

And then one day he wasn't there to carry her.

*

"Tiki, please open the door."

This was a different voice, gentle and soft and maybe a little tired. Tiki ignored him as she had the others, but this one didn't go away.

"I know the spell you've used on the door, Tiki, and I have a staff to unlock it. I can open the door right now and fetch you out, but I'd rather you came on your own."

"Go away, Merric." She felt too tired to lift her head, or to glare at the door, and so lay there listlessly with her hair streaming around her.

"Tiki, people are worried about you."

Maybe it was that Merric's voice sounded a great deal like that of her brother. Maybe it was that Merric had probably been sent up by Tiki's sister, and Tiki was just a little afraid of how much magical power Elice possessed. Maybe it was that she knew that her brother would have been disappointed in Tiki if he knew she was making people upset. Tiki sat up, swung her feet over the edge of her bed, and stood for the first time in many, many hours.

"Tiki doesn't want people to worry," she said, lapsing into the baby-talk she'd mostly grown out of. She opened the door, and found Merric standing there in his dark formal robes.

"Get dressed and come down now. Your cousins-- er, your nieces and nephews want to see you." Merric tended to get confused these days and refer to himself as an uncle instead of as Tiki's sister's husband. He began to blot away her tears with his own handkerchief, even though Tiki's tears would leave a colored stain and ruin it. After that, he ran one hand through Tiki's tangled hair and scratched the back of her ears in a way that usually made Tiki happy. "Tiki, you'd be sorry if you didn't say goodbye."

"Say... goodbye." The feeling of having her ears scratched was nice, but it didn't take away all the other feelings she didn't have names for. "Big brother is already... gone."

"It's a human foible, Tiki. We have each other for so brief a time that it always takes a long while to say goodbye."

"That's nice, really," Tiki said absently, for she was thinking of the way both Xane and Uncle Bantu had simply left without saying where they were going. But they were dragons like her, and so that didn't mean she would never see them again _ever_. It might just be a long, long time.

She looked up at Merric, and for the first time Tiki saw him not as the kind husband of sister Elice, the man who treated her with the affection he gave his own children. She saw him just as a man, a man with gray in his hair, with face and hands a little too pale and translucent. Not too far into the future, Merric would die and turn to dust, and his beloved winds would carry that dust away. Forever. But Tiki would be exactly as she now was. It was a horrible thought, and Tiki shoved it into the back of her mind and locked it up where she kept the memories of her most awful nightmares. She didn't want to spend her forever peering at all of her friends and seeing them as snowflakes about to melt.

She opened the wardrobe and began to paw through the rack of pretty gowns, gifts from her brother and sister and her friends. She had dozens of gowns-- blue embroidered with gold, and green embroidered with silver, and pale violet, and every other color in the rainbow. After a thorough hunt, she drew out one dress, a shimmering thing of pinks and reds like the clouds at sunrise.

"Ah, Tiki, you shouldn't wear that." Merric frowned and looked a little embarrassed. "Queen Caeda had a proper dress made for you."

"Big brother said I looked happy in this. He wanted me to be happy. He's going to see me happy again."

Merric was silent, but when Tiki glanced back at him, she saw tears-- human tears that looked like plain water-- slipping down his face. She held up the pink-and-red dress in front of herself and imagined dancing in it.

"I'll be happy for my brother because he can sleep now and not have to worry about anything or anyone ever again. Not even Ti-- not even me," she corrected herself. "He'll have nice dreams, won't he, Merric?"

"Very nice dreams. No nightmares, I promise."

"Maybe I'll see him sometime when I'm dreaming."

"I'm certain of it, Tiki...." Merric blinked away his water-tears. "Tiki, you need to come downstairs. I'll give you five minutes to change and fix your hair."

And so Tiki stood before the mirror in her pink cloud of a dress, and forced herself to smile, and decided that maybe she did feel a little bit better.

*

Most of the Archanean court was scandalized at the dress that Princess Tiki wore to a somber state occasion.

"Uncivilized," they said. "Spoiled her rotten, didn't he? No, she's more of an exotic pet than a person."

In weeks to come, when the civilized minds of the court saw the dragon-princess chasing butterflies in the royal garden or dashing through the markets of Pales with her hands full of trinkets, they said even more.

"Well, she's only a child. Children are such innocent creatures. Such callous and self-centered little creatures."

They could not know, with their civilized minds or human hearts, that Tiki's smile was a tribute that surpassed any formal ritual of mourning they could devise, any stately procession or stone monument or funereal dirge. They could not grasp that Tiki smiled because someone had cared enough to go to the very ends of the earth to carry her into the light. They would never know that when Tiki smiled and laughed and danced by herself, she was doing her part to hold up a promise that she would never fall back into cold solitude, but would live among the humans, in all their joy and sorrow and glorious folly, forever.

Forever, as a dragon meant it.

***Finis***

Author's Note: I've been toying with this idea for months, and this is actually my third attempt at post-game Tiki fic. The others were more elaborate, including one set three _hundred_ years post-game featuring Xane as a Comte de Saint-Germaine character. This one came together more organically, though. The basic impetus to write this came from an FE8 'fic I read wherein Myrrh never, ever gets over Ephraim and eventually commits suicide. My reaction to it was, "Tiki'd never do _that_," and the idea cooked over time. Myrrh's canonical fate and Tiki's make a good study in opposites, really. One integrates into society, and the other... doesn't. Both offer interesting fictional avenues; after all-- forever is a long, long time.


End file.
